Should Apple Pay For The Bad Deeds Of Its App Makers?

A sprawling lawsuit filed in Texas this week targets Path, Instagram, Facebook and others for instructing their apps to suck up user address book data without permission. But the most interesting part of the case may be Apple’s role in the affair and whether it had a legal duty to police the app makers. The [...]

Office of Gov. Abbott via Associated PressTexas and its localities have already begun suing one another over the state's new law banning so-called "sanctuary cities," drawing fresh battle lines in the debate over local police departments' roles in enforcing federal immigration law.

Reuters Pictures/Lucas JacksonChances are Facebook is going to talk a lot about its photo-sharing app Instagram in its fourth-quarter earnings call in January.
Ad spend on the app is going through the roof.

Apple and Google have banned the malicious app \"Who Viewed Your Profile–InstaAgent” from their respective app stores. Action was taken after Peppersoft Developer, David L-R, tweeted his findings that the app was used to harvest the Instagram passwords of users who had installed the app merely to determine their profile visitors.

What started out as an inside-baseball squabble over the data that third-party applications pull from iPhones has turned into a federal case. Literally. Two lawmakers have sent Apple a letter demanding answers after news emerged that several popular applications for the company’s iOS platform pull a user’s entire address book without their permission.